Thursday, September 18, 2008

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said today the U.S. is “running out of time” to get the war in Afghanistan right and announced that he was developing a “new, more comprehensive strategy” to cover the entire region.

Adm. Michael G. Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman, and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates both emphasized in congressional testimony that the military and broader U.S. government needed to look at the threat from Pakistan’s tribal regions and the insurgency in Afghanistan as a single problem.

In recent months, military leaders have looked at the movement of extremists across the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan with growing alarm. And today Gates and Mullen echoed regional commanders’ concerns that havens in Pakistan were fueling the insurgency in Afghanistan.

Reagan meets with CIA-ISI lavished Afghan Mujahideen, later to become the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Reagan would call these religious fanatics and cutthroats "freedom fighters."

Once again, we have the Hegelian dialectic in action. The CIA essentially created the Afghan Mujahideen, later to be called al-Qaeda and the Taliban, as part of another dialectical project — taking down the Soviet Union, a pet project of Zbigniew Brzezinski — and this assemblage of Wahabbi religious fanatics, misfits, cutthroats, mental cases, and psychotics was set-up, with the blessing of Pakistan’s intelligence service and the CIA, in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

In 1980, writes Phil Gasper, with the “support of Pakistan’s military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, the U.S. began recruiting and training both mujahideen fighters from the 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and large numbers of mercenaries from other Islamic countries. Estimates of how much money the U.S. government channeled to the Afghan rebels over the next decade vary, but most sources put the figure between $3 billion and $6 billion, or more. Whatever the exact amount, this was ‘the largest covert action program since World War II’ — much bigger, for example, than Washington’s intervention in Central America at the same time, which received considerably more publicity.”

In 1985, Reagan issued a National Security Decision Directive to escalate covert action in Afghanistan significantly, providing the Mujahideen “with extensive satellite reconnaissance data of Soviet targets on the Afghan battlefield, plans for military operations based on the satellite intelligence, intercepts of Soviet communications, secret communications networks for the rebels, delayed timing devices for tons of C-4 plastic explosives for urban sabotage, and sophisticated guerrilla attacks, long-range sniper rifles, a targeting device for mortars that was linked to a U.S. Navy satellite, wire-guided anti-tank missiles, and other equipment,” and eventually 1,000 state-of-the-art, shoulder-fired Stinger antiaircraft missiles.